Game Demo - Compatability test
Community Forums/Showcase/Game Demo - Compatability test
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| "Bad, Bad Bots!" - compatability test demo Game Demo (14 meg)  I'm trying to get ready for the upcoming IGF competition so I'm releasing a very small demo to see if I've missed any compatibility issues. The demo only includes 6 short tutorial levels but it's a great taste of what's to come! Please give it a try and let me know if you have any graphical or technical issues. Also, FPS and system specs would be greatly appreciated. I'm hitting crunch time so the more sure I am that the game is solid the sooner I can get a *FULL DEMO* out for you guys to chew on! So get downloading!!! I've included a detailed readme.txt file. But in a nutshell: arrow keys for movement [CTRL] to activate items z - zoom in camera x - zoom out camera space - quickly zoom all the way out [Tab] - display FPS data (Remember, pull the .exe out of the zip before you execute it) |
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| Runs beautifully on my Radeon X1600 Pro. Looking forward to the full game. This really is one of the most impressive games I have seen done with Blitz. How did you do it? I mean what components were used? Sprite Candy, physics engine? etc... Well done! This is a killer. |
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| Runs dandy on this crap computer (1.54ghz AMD XP, 128mb GF FX5200), average 120fps with the standard camera view & resolution (1024x768 @ 32bit depth). You up for taking critique/comments btw? Game looks great, just a couple little niggles I noticed/dislike. |
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| Thanks guys! @Boiled Sweets - Well, looking at my include list there's AMT particle system; Nuclear Glory (v2) for collisions; Juicy Fonts to handle text; nSprite2 for GUI stuff and tons of assorted code that I've collected since I began this project well over a year ago and molebox to handle the exe stuff. @Genexi2 - comment away! |
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| Hmmm this looks intresting. Ill try it as soon as I can get back on my good computer. |
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| Let's see.....some of these you probably already know about, but just incase : (some of these may appear nitpicky) - Holding Up/Down on normal ground makes the guy moonwalk - Control configuration possibly? I always kept pressing Up to activate objects/enter doorway when the game wants you to hit Ctrl. - Areas 3 & 4 are the same in your demo. - Possibly make the fan actually blow you back a bit when you near an active one? (with possible a little particle "gust" effect?) - Allow the mouse to click the Ok button before a stage starts - I feel ingame mouse control may be worth a time investment if you can get a pathfinding system going so the guy can head to a clicked destination. - Anychance of adding to the animation where the guy gets zapped that he keels over in the end? - I feel that the transport routes should automatically move your player down in the direction it's currently set to upon setting foot in it. (and possibly at a faster rate of speed) - Cant replicate this, might have been this older system acting up, but the game locked up for a bit on the 2nd stage with the level-info up, couldn't find the cause, but it seemed to have worked fine after I alt-tabbed (went to force-shut it down since I couldn't do anything in it), but then decided to re-open it to double-check any problems - Possibly consider adding a "shut-off" effect to the laser beams? (make current particles of the effect float & die off or something should work) - Possibly add some more means of indication of a transports current direction, as well as somethin for the doors? (doors may not be too color-blind friendly as it stands) And that's all I can think of atm, really love the graphics still, they got that clean look to them, in a way that almost makes them look bump-mapped. Dont know if its me, but I feel the game is a slight bit more immersive (if that's even possible on a puzzle game) with the camera drawn in to the same distance the first stage shows, in the later larger stages. |
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| Nuclear Glory, hmm. Been to their site but they don't seem to have a Blitz3d version available. ANy thoughts? |
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| Great feedback, Genexi2. Thanks! > Holding Up/Down on normal ground makes the guy moonwalk - Yep, covered that one in the readme.txt file. As I said in there I know it's broke, but I have to leave something to fix. Right? :) > Control configuration possibly? I always kept pressing Up to activate objects/enter doorway when the game wants you to hit Ctrl. - Oh yes. When the proper demo is complete you'll be able to configure it all as you like. > Areas 3 & 4 are the same in your demo. - Nope. The layout is the same. But level 4 introduces the player to timed controlers that revert back after they expire. I could change the layout but I figured that keeping it the same would make it easier to see the difference between a timed & non-timed controller. > Possibly make the fan actually blow you back a bit when you near an active one? - I had this at one time but I got into trouble with collisions and eventually had to change it to this format. The sliding was a cool feature but it just broke too many things so I had to change it to more of a 1 way type passage. If I felt strongly that I could make the sliding work I'd pursue it. But I lost too much time already to trying to get it to behave. > Allow the mouse to click the Ok button before a stage starts - Unless I put mouse control back into the gameplay segment I think it's better to not have this option so the player moves his attention to the keyboard. > I feel ingame mouse control may be worth a time investment if you can get a pathfinding system going so the guy can head to a clicked destination. - I had it in for months. The problem was how do I discern from a 'move to here' mouse click and an 'activate this' mouse click. The only clean system I came up with was using right mouse click to activate an item. But it was so demanding that the game slipped away from the 'casual' genre. When all other items are addressed I'll come back to see if I can mouse control plugged back in and working well. In the meantime, it's keyboard only. > Anychance of adding to the animation where the guy gets zapped that he keels over in the end? - Yeah, it is a little plain. I think I was just tired and said 'good enough'. I'll come back around to it eventually and see if I can add some more. > I feel that the transport routes should automatically move your player down in the direction it's currently set to upon setting foot in it. (and possibly at a faster rate of speed) - This one I'll have to disagree on. If you're sliding down the tube as a robot is walking by underneath you the last thing you'll want is to uncontrollably slide right into your doom. So I'll leave the controls in the player's hands. In some of the proper challenging levels you'll see how important manual control will be. > Cant replicate this, [crash] - Doh! I'll keep my fingers crossed that it was just a hiccup. > Possibly consider adding a "shut-off" effect to the laser beams? - You know, I figured that the sound effect (once it's added) would be enough to sell it. But I think you're completely right. When all the main stuff is addressed I'll come back to this one as well. Great stuff! This is exactly the kind of testing and constructive comments I'm looking for. Thanks again. |
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| *bouncing off topic for a sec* @Boiled Sweets - long story short... Nuclear Glory v2 was pretty good. v3 came out and it was a disaster. Didn't work at all and was twice as slow as v2 on the rare occasions when it did work! He's been working on v4 ever since. It sounds promising (and he swears that he's still creating a B3D version) but no idea when B3D v4 will actually see the light of day. I bought v3 (unaware it didn't work, obviously) and was later given a license to v2. And that's what I used. And to be honest it worked like a champ! Like anything it has quirks. But as you can see from this teaser demo it does indeed work. It was $15 (or was it $20?) well spent. Couldn't have gotten the game finished without it. |
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| Thanks for the info and all the best with the game, it's looks great and plays great. I'll do a full report when the full game is available. |
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| Couple more (should have read that readme earlier ;/) : - Anychance if having a shadow appear on the bottom floor when player is using a ladder or transport? - Font is too aliased for my tastes at lower resolutions, speaking mainly for 640x480 (hard on my eyes), but it aint so sharp @ 800x600 either as it could be, possibly consider a different font, or bump the resolution up for the lower displays? - Seems to be a small seam in the texture used behind the transport effect, noticed it testing at a low-rez, but it's also there at higher, just another nitpick. - Anychance of non-4:3 aspect-ratio resolution choices? Alot of LCDs these days run 1280x1024 as their native rez. Tried it on "my" PC this time (2.21ghz AMD64 3600+, 256mb GF6800 GT), seemed to have capped off around 400fps. You also probably already know this, but the demo takes 100mb of ram here, but I take it yer little test there loads everything up into ram, rather then what's just needed for the level currently being selected? |
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| Dustin, Great work dude. I (and I am siure many others) have been waiting to see a demo of this for ages. It runs sweetly on my Athlon 19+ (1.6Mhz), 768 MB Ram, Geforece 6600 (256MB), PC. IPete2. |
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| I played it for a little while and it seems to play very well. One criticism - when the camera is zoomed right in on the character the camera seems to react a little out of time with the movement. When the player ceases moving after running for a bit the camera keeps moving and then comes back into place. |
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| Played fine with no hiccups on a WinXP, 1MB, GeForceFX5200(128mb)... ran at about 76 to 81 fps overall... great looking graphics and animation... one or two things i noticed... the transport tube level allowed me to reset the direction of the tube to up, and once i got up, i was trapped up there... no sound, was that intentional for the test... this looks like it's just about ready to go prime time, to me... big congratulations... --Mike |
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| Nice demo. It ran smoothly on my system. 256MB Radeon 9800XT - 1GB DDR - 3GHZ Processor. Graphics are cool and the animations smooth. All it needs now are some big levels and lots of baddies. :) |
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| Glad to see that it's behaving itself on all these machines. @Genexi2 - more notes. Cool! > Anychance if having a shadow appear on the bottom floor when player is using a ladder or transport? -I thought about that. I'll put that on my 'when I can get to it' list. I agree it'd be a nice touch. > Font is too aliased for my tastes at lower resolutions, speaking mainly for 640x480 (hard on my eyes), but it aint so sharp @ 800x600 either as it could be, possibly consider a different font, or bump the resolution up for the lower displays? -That's cool. I'll address that. > Seems to be a small seam in the texture used behind the transport effect, noticed it testing at a low-rez, but it's also there at higher, just another nitpick. -Check out the eagle eyes!! I'm mirroring the texture and the lower res mipmap is picking up the edges (which are black). I'll go back, when time permits, and clean up the textures. That'll take care of all the texture creases (there's others but I won't point them out :) ) > Anychance of non-4:3 aspect-ratio resolution choices? Alot of LCDs these days run 1280x1024 as their native rez. -Not very likely. I had a 1280x1024 res that kept messing up. Turned out that I had hard coded tons of stuff that required a 1.33 aspect ratio. It was an obvious mistake. But I think it'd be too much to address at this point and I'd probably just break more things in the process. Rookie mistake for sure, but this is my first game. :) I promise the next game will have 16:9 settings for sure! > the demo takes 100mb of ram here -Yep, I load it all so levels display instantly. There's major bloat at the moment. But once textures are optimized that number will come down a lot. @Matty -actually that was intentional. The camera moves ahead to help show what's coming up and gradually. There's a delay to the camera movements to allow it to ease in and out. I thought it looked prettier than having it snap quickly back into place. If more people comment on this then I might make it selectable and give an option to have the camera lock on the whole time. @Red October >the transport tube level allowed me to reset the direction of the tube to up, and once i got up, i was trapped up there... -You have to open the door (key computer) before you go back up the tube. Some levels will allow you to get stuck and force you to reset. That's part of the challenge. But then again, this is a tutorial level. So it's probably a good idea to add one at the top in this case. I'll do that. @Amon >All it needs now are some big levels and lots of baddies. :) -Yep, yep,yep. That's what I'll be putting my full attention on very shortly. :) Thanks for the input guys! |
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| All ran nice and smooth here. Getting ~90 FPS. 1Ghz, GeForce2 GTS 32MB, 256MB RAM, win98SE |
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| Good stuff. Works fine on my P4 3.2GHz, 1Gb, XP Home SP2, DirectX 9.0c(ish), Radeon9800XT. |
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| Athlon 64 1 gig / Radeon 7000+ load time about 5 seconds (but I had other programs running...) Sound would slow this down a bit and background music as well probably! Gmae fine. Controls speedy. Menus basic and I thought the program had glitched since I didn't have a mouse but had to use CTRL to select OK in menus... Animation superb (per your usual standard!) Can't wait to see more! |
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| About 220 FPS with 4310 tris rendered. Why is there no 1280x960 res? |
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| >Why is there no 1280x960 res? Hmm, didn't know anyone used that res. I can add that one. |
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| You probably should have it hunt through the list of available resolutions. (http://blitzbasic.com/b3ddocs/command.php?name=CountGFXModes&ref=2d_cat) That would be the safest thing to do :D |
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| I got a memory exception (on an Athlon64 XPSP2), disabled DEP and it worked fine. Was it built with recent version of Blitz3D? |
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| @skidracer - Oops! I'm using v1.91. I'll upgrade before I release the next demo. Thanks for catching that. |
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| Looks like an up to date Impossible Mission; cool! Have you got 1440x900 resolution covered yet? (it's grown in popularity.) |
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| love the look. graphics are very nice what program did you animate the main character in? |
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| Wohooooooooo testing, gimme some minutes. This is so exiting! :) edit: Runs smooth. => x850xt-pe. Could you add 1280x1024 as resolution? |
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| sorry if someone has said this already, but it would feel more natural to me if pressing up went into doors. |
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| Very Nice. Smooth as on my lowly gfx440mx. |
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| Just as it would be natural to activate computers and other stuff. It worked great for Mission Impossible on C64, so it would work here, as well... Otherwuse it looks great. I am looking forward to see this one completed. Barney |
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| Really nicely done. I'm with the "up" key crowd, for doors and computers. One minor thing that felt wrong was having mouse control on the menu screen but not in dialogs -- it feels inconsistent. I felt the one-way tubes should have forced me up/down, but maybe a little up/down movement (along with the current floating anim) would help, and perhaps a touch of inertia when releasing the direction key... ? Only other minor complaint would be that the zoom operates a little too quickly for me. Looks and plays fantastic though. |
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| That game is amazing man! Well played. I agree with up arrow should go through doors. I also agree that if you use the mouse to control some of the interface, you should use the mouse to control all of it. You said you were in crunch time, you know there are two deadlines for IGF right? The first one is your initial submission, which can be a late alpha, or beta. The second deadline is later on, and you can upload a completely new, updated build to that one. So don't lose too much sleep, you have more time than you think :) Oh yeah my specs: worked fine on Dell with crappy on board video card. P4 2.8 Ghz, 1 GB ram. |
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| More great feedback, thanks guys! Yep, I've had several requests for the 'up' arrow key going into the exit. I'll do that. And to be consistant, I'll add 'up' arrow key functionality to the computers as well. @polygoon - I don't see 1440x900 happening (Ironic, I'm typing this on my laptop with a 1440x900 res. :) ) As I mentioned earlier, I hard coded a bunch of stuff with 1.33 aspect ratios in mind (slaps forehead with a Homer style 'DOH!'). At this point it's too difficult reworking that code so I'm stuck with 1.33 resolutions for this game. @Pete Carter - Lightwave. It was all Lightwave 3D. @Grisu - Nope, can't do the 1280x1024. See my note to polygoon. @Blitzsupport - I know it's a little mixed up having keys and mouse for the menus and then keys only for the gameplay. But seeing that it's unlikely that I'll get the mouse gameplay working, that only leaves me with the choice of yanking the mouse control from the menus and making everything keyboard only. Won't people be complaining that the mouse doesn't work on the menus? Hmm... I'll ponder. -The tubes have to be left manual without any inertia. You don't get the danger on these tutorial levels but there'll be pleanty of times where you'll want to stop on a dime. Trust me on the one. The zoom is a little to quick? I'll add a feature that allows you to adjust that. @Liberator - I picked Andy Schatz's brain (Venture Africa) and he said the same thing about the IGF deadline. But there's tons of competition so I'm trying to get as much of it polished and ready as I can. I went to GDC last March as an observer. I'd really like to go again next year as a contestant. :) Thanks again, guys. For over a year now I've been spending nights and weekends banging away at this game. This is really the first time that this thing has seen daylight. And from all the encouraging responses, it makes it feel like the last year's spare time has been well spent. |
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| Dustin, it's not a case of wanting mouse control in the game. It's the dialogs (ie. those that explain how to play each level) -- they should allow you to use the mouse to close them, since they appear the same as the main menus, which are mouse-controlled. |
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| @BlitzSupport - Makes sense. I actually had that mouse-tutorial-menu option in there before but yanked it for the reasons I mentioned. But you make a good point. I'll leave the mouse cursor active and allow the ok button to be selected with a mouse click and see what the response is. |
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| Dustin, could you at least bring mid resolutions between 1024 and 1600? Even if 1280x1024 isn't possible. |
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| The animation is excellent! Looks fabulous! |
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| @Grisu - I will do a 1280x960 res. @Bouncer - coming from the guy behind nano, that's the best of compliments! |
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| Wow, this looks fantastic! Any chance you could include the robot enemies in the demo? |
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| Yeah, we need an updated demo... :D |
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| You guys are going to have to wait until after September 8th for a new demo... unless you want to help beta test. :) E-mail me if you're interested. |
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| Good game man I wanth the full one :(( |
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| Awesome game. Runs fine (see specs below) Things I noticed and things you should tweak: - Your main character mesh intersects with the wall if you walk into it. So the hand or foot will go into the wall. Very minor but I noticed it. - You should have an animation if you try and walk into a wall. Perhaps make him push it.. or lean on it.. something. At the moment it looks weird that he runs on the spot. - I agree with blitzsupports mouse menu point of view. My initial reaction was "hmm is the game not working properly?, how am I going to click this button where is the cursor?" that was until I read the text "press ctrl". - When you go through the floor force fields. (the bits on level 2) .. there should be some kind of glowy ring in the field. A bit like say in stargate when they go through the wormhole, there is a ripple. - Need some comedy idle animations. If you stop moving for a while, play one of a few idle animations. Maybe Biting nail.. looking around.. scratching head.. that sort of thing. - Would be good to be able to press up to activate stuff and go through doors. - Im not too keen on the contrast of the blue surrounding. Its looking ace tho. From the screenshots I wasnt quite sure.. but seeing it run is great, its really well made! |
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| Maybe Biting nail lol how would he do that through his helmet? From the screenshots I wasnt quite sure o_0 I thought the screenshots look fantastic. |
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| Dustin, do you ever check mails? ;) |
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| hahaha good point, so he should take the helmet off :P lol. I dunno .. the screenshots.. some of the details are inconsistant. The 3d parts are all really detailed but then the blue tiled bit is lacking in detail. Kind of looked a bit strange to me. I guess you don't really notice it as much when there is lots of movement and you are having to concentrate on playing rather then studying a screenshot. |
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| @skn3: > Your main character mesh intersects with the wall -I'll get around to addressing mesh intersections eventually but at the moment it's far down on the to do list. >You should have an animation if you try and walk into a wall. Perhaps make him push it.. or lean on it.. something. At the moment it looks weird that he runs on the spot. -I'll keep adding more and more anims over time. And the running in place is fixed in the newer version. When I release then next version you'll see it. >I agree with blitzsupports mouse menu point of view. -Fixed. When I release then next version you'll see it. >When you go through the floor force fields. (the bits on level 2) .. there should be some kind of glowy ring -Agreed. On the to do list. >Need some comedy idle animations. - I love idle animations (Commander Keen did great ones back in the day). Also on the never ending to do list. > Would be good to be able to press up to activate stuff and go through doors. -Fixed. When I release then next version you'll see it. > Im not too keen on the contrast of the blue surrounding. - Different sets of levels will have a different color background. @jhocking >lol how would he do that through his helmet? :) :) :) >o_0 I thought the screenshots look fantastic. Muchas gracis. @Grisu - > Dustin, do you ever check mails? ;) - My last post was at 3am my time. A guy has to sleep some time,right? :) |
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| No, you have to code till you fall off the chair... :) |
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| The 3d parts are all really detailed but then the blue tiled bit is lacking in detail. I think if it were any more detailed it would be annoying, too visually distracting. Right now the detail contrast tells me "look at the level, not at the background." |
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| runs really well here, excellent character animations too :) Min FPS 135 Avg FPS 136 Max FPS 137 P4 2.6, 512mb DDR2100, 128mb 9800Pro, XP SP2 |
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| I think if it were any more detailed it would be annoying, too visually distracting. Right now the detail contrast tells me "look at the level, not at the background." Most probably true, I didnt think it needed lots.. but most notcibly is the fact that the panels in the repeated texture should be varying shades of color.. rather then random blocks of color in a layer undereneath the paneling work.. |
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